"Safe for birds, but not for people": Centering the Landscape in Urszula Glensk's Pin. Stories from the Polish-Belarusian Border

Abstract

This article attends to the entanglement of violence and the border landscape as depicted in Urszula Glensk’s 2023 polyphonic reportage Pinezka. Historie z granicy polsko-białoruskiej (Pin. Stories from the Polish-Belarusian Border), and is the first published critical engagement with the text written in English. Glensk’s multifocal text evokes the border as a site of varied assemblages of human and beyond-the-human actants, exposing the nuanced complexity of irregular border crossing as a site of relentless negotiation of one’s survival amidst military violence and harsh topographical conditions. By examining the narratives of survival of those on the move alongside local accounts of border violence, I argue that the border landscape is actively mobilized as both the foundational and final practice of border necropolitics, challenging questions of agency, accountability, and perpetratorship. Subversively, in its final section, the article hopes to illuminate the local reclamation of the border landscape as a site of political solidarity and resistance.